


Simple Magics

by deskclutter



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Community: 31_days, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-25
Updated: 2010-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 06:35:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deskclutter/pseuds/deskclutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a simple magic about a pen and paper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simple Magics

**Title:** Simple Magics  
**Day/Theme:** December 1st / Piece by piece by piece  
**Series:** Princess Tutu  
**Character/Pairing:** Fakir/Ahiru, Autor  
**Rating:** PG

There is a simple magic about a pen and paper. The nib scribes fluidly across the white: marking it, scarring it, altering it irrevocably.

Fluid, he thinks, calling up word associations: liquid (gold), water (tears ... all too cliche), flowing (hair, down and down in a red braid to end in a burst), free (as a duck), abstract (thoughts, pattering on and on in an endless stream of), paint (oil and watercolours...).

Perhaps today ... and he brings a brush with him outside, a box of paints. A flower blossoms in the corner of his paper canvas, watery red, clear as crystalline tears; blue for the sky, open and wide, slashed in twain by the branch of the leafy tree growing greenly wild, and old, with deep brown knots and creases along its trunk, its bark, its branches. Its roots buttress, and the lake licks against its side, moss dark with algae, still as a mirror until a pond skater moves, flitting shallow ripples to fold gently along the face of the lake. It will pass in moments, but long enough to set the duck in motion; she breaks the mirror, irrevocably. The lake will still by nightfall but the reflection with it changed, a forward far into the future. Seven years of bad luck, thinks the painter, blending abstract shapes against the sky. The brush bleeds; the paint waters itself through the paper grain. A thousand words, but not the right ones.

He has a cousin, a pianist. _Plonk_, go the keys beneath his own hands; the pianist's fingers are long, sensitive. They coax, they call, and music marches to his beat; an aria, a waltz, a march, a measure. It flows, like liquid, through the window, golden bright and syrup thick, dousing and drowning. Butter smooth, the notes quiver, and warbling, they take flight: a phoenix carved tremblingly of song, rising from the ash of old dreams, the dust of forgotten hopes. An octave spans eight notes, says the pianist. The alphabet is composed of twenty-six. Use them.

You have more than one octave, says the man of the simple magic.

Dreams, he thinks, tracing the shape of a wooden girl cobbled from a broken marionette. Sleep, travel the silver edge of dawn and daybreak, and then away it slips, come the morn. Memory quakes, losing itself. A dream cannot reconstruct itself of forgotten aether, in the waking hours. There is a thread: it runs, knits itself into a thousand words, but daylight tears it; the moon resews it. But the moon cannot call the construct together; it shakes, shattering. Fear of misremembering is its undoing, and a man of simple magic cannot risk so little to fuel so much.

He calls once, Ahiru.

Shadows shift; there can be no such shifting without the brief bursts of light; they flash, disappear. A girl stands outlined, traced against the light and gone; a sword, a book, a raven, a clock, a pen, a feather, a swan. Wings unwrap and the light stops; he is in the dark until a red stone glows.

What do you fear?

I cannot, he says finally, unknowing if he fears he cannot or that he cannot fear (perhaps it is both), and he unfreezes. He takes a step--  
\--he tumbles down and down and down and--

A song, light and crystal sharp, slicing through the silver fog resting heavy on his mind. He shifts; he sees the flirt of blue feathers beyond the window. He rises, untangling from the mess of blankets and the floor. _Thump,_ goes the floor, and he starts. "Quack!?" goes something else; he looks -- he wishes he hadn't; now he is as red as the flower he painted, red as a phoenix, or the spots that dance after watching the sun too long. He looks elsewhere: the wall is inked; so are his palms, and a quill flickers pale in its fall somewhere as the other scrambles. "I'm sorry I'm sorry don't look!!"

"Just put some clothes on," he mutters, and before he turns, two arms slip around him, smooth as oil and half as graceful; dry lips flutter on his cheek. "Idiot," then he shifts to face the morning.

* * *

  
Semi-colon abuse, holy crap. I wrote this after re-watching the last four eps of season one, which are like the ultimate Mytho/Ahiru episodes ever, so I have _no idea where the heck_ this is coming from.


End file.
